Friday, July 11, 2014

On June 2, the Palestinians announced a new unity government, which included Hamas, an organization designated by the U.S. State Department as a terrorist group.

American aid to the Palestinians since the mid-1990′s, according to a Congressional Research Service report, has exceeded $5 billion. In recent years it has averaged $500 million per year.

The report notes three major U.S. objectives of these funds: preventing terrorism against Israel from Hamas; fostering “stability, prosperity, and self-governance on the West Bank”; humanitarian aid.

When Hamas joined the Palestinian government on June 2, the United States recognized the new government and there was no indication that the substantial funding Palestinians get from American taxpayers would be impacted. Business as usual would continue.

It shouldn’t surprise that U.S acceptance was seen as a green light for terror. Shortly thereafter, missiles started flying again from the Hamas-governed Gaza strip into Israel, and shortly after that, three teenage Israeli boys, one with dual American-Israeli citizenship, were kidnapped and murdered.

The response from America’s president to the kidnapping/murders was to convey American neutrality to an act of terror and to “urge all parties to refrain from steps that would further destabilize the situation.”

It should be clear to all that the world is spinning out of control and becoming an increasingly dangerous place because where there is supposed to be leadership from the leader of the free world there is now a vacuum.

Yes, the government's acceptance of Hamas in a "unity" government is exactly what encouraged the latest spate of violence. No less offensive is how the public's money keeps getting sent - and wasted - on an entity that has nothing but hate for them as well. Parker's right, funding to the PLO must cease.

A disabled man was severely injured and seven more people were lightly injured Friday morning when a rocket fired from the Gaza Strip hit an Ashdod gas station, starting a massive fire. An Israeli Air Force plane bombed the launch site from where the rocket was fired.

The 61-year-old man who was seriously wounded in the blast was unable to exit his car when the air raid siren sounded, leaving him vulnerable. After being treated initially at Kaplan Medical Center in Rehovot, the man was transferred to Beilinson Hospital in Petach Tikva for further care.

Magen David Adom emergency services paramedic Yehuda Gabai was on his way to reserve duty when he saw the explosion.

"I heard the alarm and took cover," he said. "When I lifted my head, I saw a cloud of smoke and ran to the scene. MDA staff helped me get the injured man out of car."

Public Security Minister Yitzhak Aharonovitch, who arrived at the scene, said, "To their credit, people fled and took cover. If they hadn't, there would be many more people injured." He then praised the Iron Dome system for protecting Israel from the ongoing rocket fire.

Following the explosion in Ashdod, three rockets from Gaza were intercepted over the Tel Aviv area by the Iron Dome defense system. Air raid sirens sounded in cities throughout central Israel, including Tel Aviv, Herzliya, Hod Hasharon, Rehovot, Givatayim and Ramat Gan.

Shrapnel from the interceptions fell around the Tel Aviv area, including near a children's playground.

One more reason why a ground operation is going to have to be conducted, otherwise, this horror will return in the forseeable future. Zvika Fogel says every last Hamas terrorist should be smashed to pieces.

The South China Morning Post, of all news sources, published an op-ed by Israel's foreign minister where he makes clear that Israel is fighting back against Hamas aggression:

Israel this week began a military operation in Gaza, in response to ongoing Hamas rocket fire.

The latest round of rocket fire began on June 12, the day that three Israeli teenagers were abducted and murdered. The Hamas shooting escalated significantly on June 30, even before the bodies of the teens were found and before the murder of a Palestinian youth, which was condemned sharply by the entire Israeli leadership, and whose murderers are already held in custody.

Over the past three weeks, the Hamas terrorist organisation has escalated its attack on Israeli civilians, launching nearly 300 rockets at our cities - including Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and other major metropolitan areas - putting millions of Israeli lives at risk.

Families have been forced into shelters, summer camps for children closed, and all normal daily activities have been impacted. This is unacceptable.

Israel had shown great restraint prior to this operation. Our intention was to restore the calm without a major military operation.

However, Israel's repeated efforts to achieve calm were met with increased rocket fire by what is becoming a Hamas terrorist state.

Therefore, Israel launched an operation of self-defence on Monday, to counter these attacks, to defend our citizens and secure for them a life without constant threat.

Attacking and endangering unarmed civilians is unacceptable, and the Hamas - not to mention the PLO - have to go.

Thursday, July 10, 2014

In a landmark judgment pertaining to India's more than 160 million Muslims, the Supreme Court on Monday ruled that Sharia courts run by clerics have no legal sanctity and that their fatwas are not binding on anyone.

The top court said Islamic judges, who interpret religious law, can only rule when individuals submit voluntarily to them and their decisions, or fatwas, are not legally enforceable.

A bench of Justices C.K. Prasad and Pinaki Chandra Ghose restrained forums like Dar-ul Qaza, Dar-ul-Iftaa and Dar-ul-Uloom Deoband from giving verdicts or issuing fatwas against a person who is not before it on the basis of complaints by "strangers".

Women's rights activists are glad, since it can help defend the rights of Muslim women. Now if only Britain would learn from this, and get their own courts to make a ruling against the sharia advocates operating freely in their country under the protection of local law officials, but alas, I don't think the UK will ever pay attention to India's courageous steps.

The writer of The Sandman and Books of Magic wrote this sloppy defense (?) of the British-Norwegian author in response to another writer's argument* why it's important to read even the works of bigoted book writers:

Anti-Dahlism has been further fuelled by a 1994 unauthorized biography, by the British writer Jeremy Treglown, which presents a complicated, domineering, and sometimes disagreeable man. Dahl was “a war hero, a connoisseur, a philanthropist and a devoted family man who had to confront an appalling succession of tragedies,” Treglown writes. “He was also . . . a fantasist, an anti-Semite, a bully and a self-publicizing trouble-maker.” When his first wife, the actress Patricia Neal, suffered a severe stroke at the age of thirty-nine, he adopted a cruel-to-be-kind strategy—bullying, goading, and sometimes humiliating her into acting again. He was prone to eruptions of pique. In 1981, Robert Gottlieb, who was at the time the editorial director of Knopf, Dahl’s American publisher, severed ties with Dahl, citing his “abusiveness” to the staff. More than once, Dahl offered up anti-Semitic remarks; in 1983, he told a journalist that “there’s a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity . . . I mean there is always a reason why anti-anything crops up anywhere; even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason.” (Such noxious sentiments, it must be said, cannot be found in his work for children.) And, in 1989, Dahl, who had no trouble waxing indignant about attempts to ban his own work, denounced Salman Rushdie as “a dangerous opportunist” after the fatwa was issued against him. [...]

As biased as the New Yorker may have been in Dahl's favor, they do admit he said something very repulsive, and even if he ostensibly didn't support Hitler/the Nazis in their attacks on Britain, he did condone their anti-semitism. And that, in itself, is a form of support. As this also notes, he was soft on Islamofascism too.

Now maybe Dahl's anti-semitism and racism (and tolerance for Islamofascism) didn't show up in his own books (according to one account I read years ago, that's because one of his editors persuaded him to refrain), but he did rely on a lot of alarming cruelty and repellent sense of humor in his works. I was foolish enough to read some of his junk in my youth, like James and the Giant Peach, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory/Great Glass Elevator, and The Witches, and in retrospect, they were some of most slovenly excuses for children's adventures I ever read. I think one of the worst has to be The Big Friendly Giant (BFG for short), because if there's any tale Dahl told where his politics seeped in, that was it: when the BFG and the little girl are in Buckingham Palace, already introduced to the Queen of England and discussing the menace of the other 9 man-eating giants, the military says they'll mow them down with weapons, but the Queen balks at this idea, saying "I do not believe in murder". Without taking into account that's just what the other creepy giants were doing. It's a classically stupid argument that wiping out a formidably evil entity is literally committing the exact same sin as the murderous entity itself. Thinking about that now, I almost feel like using an exclamation by one of the giants after capture: "I is bopmuggered", because it could describe what I feel after reading some of Dahl's work: that my soul was mugged.

And Gaiman thinks this is someone who needs defending? I don't think so. Even if Dahl's racism didn't turn up in his books per se, he still had a very revolting vision of both parents and children, with women possibly hurt even more than the men in some of his stories. Just because there's a leading lady in The Witches (the grandmother of the unnamed protagonist), doesn't exonerate it from the bizarre misogyny it embodies. (Side note: I also hated the illustrations by Quentin Blake). Truly, what is there to learn from Dahl's works when he exhibited such a pretentious, downbeat take on life, tainted with nastiness? I hesitate to think of what his tales would be like if they were adapted into comics. There are authors with repellent views whose works may still be important reads. But Dahl, with all his sick ideas for storytelling, wasn't one of them. I think Gaiman would do better not to say something that only comes off as embarrassingly dumb.

* The list in that article unfortunately also puts Orson Scott Card on it.

With all the jihad now being waged against Israel, it's not the time for the two main Haredi parties in the Knesset to balk at entering the government over grudges, yet that's exactly what they're doing:

The leaders of Shas and United Torah Judaism rejected overtures from Likud officials Tuesday who wanted them to join Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s governing coalition.

Netanyahu was forced to give up his long-standing political bond with the haredi (ultra-Orthodox) parties when Yesh Atid and Bayit Yehudi insisted they be left out of the coalition.

But Likud officials hoped that due to the ongoing security situation, Shas and UTJ could enter the coalition without angering Likud’s current partners.

Officials in Shas and UTJ confirmed that overtures had come from Likud.

But UTJ chairman Ya’acov Litzman said there was little to no chance of his party entering the coalition and Shas leader Arye Deri was even more pessimistic.

“There is no need now for such a thing,” Deri said. “At this stage such talk is worthless. There is no such proposal. We are not joining the government.”

Evidently, he thinks political positions are more important than public safety, which is shameful. At a time when even the Haredi population he represents is in danger, Deri would do better to put aside his disagreements on economic policies and join the coalition, yet he continues with a very insulting stance, no doubt under the confidence that most Haredis won't be perturbed from voting for his party and UTJ, which, sadly, is true. A lot of insular Haredis suffer from ghetto mentality, and Deri's making the situation worse by acting so selfish.

Wednesday, July 09, 2014

Here's a report in Haaretz that says some of the people involved in the death of Mohammed Abu Khder came from the outskirts of Haredi society. Assuming there's any meat to it, it should raise some alarm bells:

The names of the six suspects in the murder of Mohammed Abu Khdeir are still under a gag order, and as some of them are minors, it’s not clear when or if their names will ever be released. What can be said is that these youths are on the margins of the ultra-Orthodox community.

In other words, they belong to the most overlooked and least understood part of Israeli society: young men and women who don’t fit into the rigid structure of their Haredi homes but have not crossed into another community and perhaps never will. They may be the most easily disowned group — not only in Israel, but in the entire Jewish world.

Tragically, they are also the most susceptible to influence from Kahanist and other racist groups that trawl the streets of Jerusalem for such disaffected youths, offering them acceptance into a cult that fuses nationalism, Judaism, violence and lawlessness.

I'm going to have to object here - what that gang practiced was not Judaism or even nationalism, as the author must surely want it to be. It was nothing more than one-dimensional hatred on their part, and I think they must've done it on purpose to undermine Israel. The Jerusalem Post has more:

Although the identities of the six suspects arrested in connection with the murder of Muhammed Abu Khdeir have not been released for publication, it is now clear that they come from a marginal Sephardi haredi background and that they are part of a societal grouping referred to colloquially as “delinquent youth.”

According to information gleaned by The Jerusalem Post, the suspects are from haredi neighborhoods in Jerusalem, Beit Shemesh and the settlement of Adam some 20km northwest of Jerusalem.

The background of the suspects comes as something of a surprise since it appears that the murderers do not come from among extremist settler groups which were initially suspected in the case.

Why do I get the vibe they want there to be "extremist settlers"? This is one of the most offensive things about MSM - there's certain things they want to be fact, as the 9-11 trutherists have been doing for more than a decade now.

According to sources, the young men suspected of the murder belong to a family affiliated with the Sephardic Shas party. At least one of them was described as a delinquent youth who lived on the fringes of the haredi community.

Asked about the young man, one resident said that “everybody knows that he’s crazy. The guy is just nuts. The whole family is nuts.” The grandfather of one of the suspects told Yediot Aharonot that his grandchild was disturbed and that he “could destroy worlds if he did not take his pills.” It is unclear if he was referring to the suspect from Beit Shemesh.

One local shopkeeper complained of the high number of delinquent youth in Beit Shemesh, stating that many are denied outlets to channel their energy and end up acting out on the streets.

The Haaretz report says that in Bnei Brak, you can see a lot of bored kids around who aren't helped by the way their leadership runs things. If these kids would have the approval to run proper interaction between sexes, they might have improved lives, for example. But thanks to the Haredi leadership's efforts to ruin that, this is why many can't run them genuinely.

The biggest selling haredi daily Yated Ne’eman published on its front page a statement by the head of the non-hassidic Ashkenazi haredi community Rabbi Aharon Leib Shteinman who vigorously condemned the murder.

“Whoever did such deeds threatens the life of the Jewish people,” Yated Ne’eman quoted the rabbi as saying.

“This is a terribly severe deed which is forbidden and is not the way of the Torah,” said Shteinman.

“The path of violence and revenge are not our ways and anyone who does such things threatens the lives of the Jewish people.”

The comments about threatening the lives of the Jewish people refer to a concept in Jewish law known as ‘rodef’ in which the actions of one Jew can lead to attacks on the broader Jewish community.

Such a person is considered to pose a mortal danger to the lives of others and, according to Jewish law, may be killed before he himself causes harm.

Rabbi Shalom Cohen, the spiritual leader of the haredi Shas movement, also condemned the murder in severe terms and referred to the murderers in the context of the rodef concept.

“A person whose hands are stained with the blood of innocents is liable to the law of rodef ,” Ynet quoted Shalom as saying on Monday.

Well does this mean he's sorry for that offensive comparison of non-Haredis who wear knitted kippas to Amalekites? I hope his condemnation isn't because he believes relations with Arab/Islamic sources are far more important than with other Jewish sources.

Until now, you usually didn't hear of Haredis being accused of murder. This may have to serve as a grim wakeup call, that youth in their community could be vulnerable to exploitation by lunatics, and I'm outraged that they would do something as barbaric as Islamofascists themselves to somebody with no known involvement in the murder of the yeshiva students, not to mention how they helped cause a lot of trouble on their part that could've been avoided. The culprits should be tried as adults and sent away for a long, long time.

The Environmental Protection Agency has quietly floated a rule claiming authority to bypass the courts and unilaterally garnish paychecks of those accused of violating its rules, a power currently used by agencies such as the Internal Revenue Service [which puts the burden of proof on the debtor, not on the federal agency].

[...]

...[T]he threat of garnishing wages would be a powerful incentive for people to agree to expensive settlements rather than fight EPA charges.

EPA officials did not respond to repeated questions by The Washington Times about why they thought it was necessary to garnish people's wages.

The EPA announced the plan last week in a notice in the Federal Register, saying federal law allows it "to garnish non-Federal wages to collect delinquent non-tax debts owed the United States without first obtaining a court order."...

Tuesday, July 08, 2014

This Tuesday night out on the town in Denver, which included slices of pizza with a group of people who had written to him, was Obama's way of escaping the confines of Washington, where partisan gridlock reigns supreme. It was a case of "the bear is loose," the president's own description of the times when he is able to break free of the trappings of Washington and experience what everyday Americans see.

I'd almost forgotten to note that there've been more rocket attacks coming in the past few days from Gaza, and now, the IDF's responded:

The Israeli army said it launched an offensive operation early Tuesday against the Gaza Strip to quell rocket attacks, and a Palestinian official said Israeli airstrikes injured at least nine Palestinians.

The Israeli airstrikes come after Gaza militants fired dozens of rockets at southern Israel on Monday. The military rushed more forces to the border late Monday and had warned that such an offensive was likely.

We have to hope they'll launch a ground strike too, because that's the only way to effectively combat the rocket attacks.

Monday, July 07, 2014

If you haven't twigged to it yet: Comics are for every race, creed, color, religion, gender & orientation. And everyone deserves a hero. :)
— Dan Slott (@DanSlott) July 3, 2014

For every creed and religion? Whoa, seriously? By that logic, even Vikings, Vandals, Nazis, Ottoman Empire savages, Spanish invaders who slew the Aztek and Incan empires, Confederates, Communists and Marxists deserve heroes too. And I guess he also thinks Neturei Karta, NAMBLA and the Scientologists deserve heroes. Say, maybe he thinks white supremacists and Islamic homophobes deserve "heroes"! And I thought he was against them! Gee, how much more illogical can Slott get? A great medium should not be abused by approving the notion that barbarian movements should be encouraged to exploit it.

And curious how somebody who writes a tweet like that's never argued in favor of introducing heroes and co-stars for mainstream books inspired by apostates from Islam like Brigitte Gabriel, 9-11 Families members like Tim Sumner, or even right-wingers who aren't depicted one-dimensionally.

Since we're on the subject, a tweet by one of Slott's cultists...

@DanSlott Amazing How can an Xmen fan remain so filled with hate and fear due to a handful of individuals within a minority.
— mrj (@mrjafri) July 3, 2014

...made me think of a little something originally published in The New Mutants #25 in the mid-80s, featuring a character named David Charles Haller, aka Legion and illegitimate son of Charles Xavier, and the following panel should give an idea what his premise involved:

Chris Claremont may have been a leftist, but back at the time, unlike many you see today, he did address the subject of jihadism, and how Haller's backlash at the terrorists who attacked the embassy he was at backfired when he absorbed the brain energy of the leader, Jemail Karami, who later tried to take over his brain, but faced competition from at least two other dormant brain patterns inside Haller's head to boot (in early 90s, when this story was followed up on, they really botched it). It may not have named Islam directly, but the criticism was there. I've got a feeling that tweeter knows Claremont did this story, and if so, I think he was just trying to score brownie points while remaining oblivious. If he didn't know about this story, but does own the issues, I'd suggest he sell them off before the retail value gets too low, and besides, he wouldn't want to make a laughing stock of himself by upholding a franchise that did once depict Islamofascism negatively, now would he? LOL. If that tweeter really thinks I'm full of hate/fear, he should get a good look at Claremont and even Louise Simonson back in the 80s! And "minority"? We're talking about those who embrace the worst content of the Koran/Hadith, including such chillers as Sahih Muslim 6985 and Sahih Bukhari 4.52.177. Stuff that Slott, in all his obsessive blindness, deliberately turns a blind eye to.

It'll be interesting to see how many of the would-be readers bowing before Slott still want to read Claremont's X-books after they realize he did more or less write something they consider anathema to their narrow beliefs. And one can only wonder what Slott thinks of the same scribes now, no matter what their political standings today.

ARABS INSIDE ISRAEL - 20% OF THE POPULATION - ARE FULL CITIZENS WITH MORE RIGHTS THAN ARABS ANYWHERE ELSE IN THE WORLD; THEY SERVE IN THE KNESSET AND EVEN ON THE SUPREME COURT.

JEWS WERE EXPELLED FROM ARAB NATIONS, AND THOSE WHO LIVE IN DISPUTED TERRITORY IN THE HOLY LAND ARE NOT EXPECTED TO BECOME CITIZENS OF ANY 'PALESTINIAN STATE", SHOULD THAT EVER OCCUR BECAUSE THE ARABS HAVE MADE A JUDENREIN PALESTINE A PREREQUISITE.

THERE WON'T BE PEACE UNTIL THE MORAL IMBALANCE THESE TWO DIFFERENCES EXPOSE IS FIXED.

Sunday, July 06, 2014

There are reports now that the culprits in the murder of Mohammed Abu Khdeir were Jewish - something the world press no doubt is hoping for. If indeed they were, it's an absolute outrage, since, whether they think so or not, the culprits did an enormous disservice to Israel and fueled more anti-semitism. Ben Shapiro's spoken about this last week, and said:

Should it turn out that Jews did perform this disgusting atrocity, the State of Israel will find, prosecute, and give the harshest possible penalty to the perpetrators. That in and of itself destroys any attempted moral equivalence between Israel and her enemies, given that the Hamas-unity government itself stands behind the murder of the three Jewish boys, that the Hamas-unity government propagandized in celebration of their kidnappings and deaths, and that Palestinians celebrated their deaths.

And he's got more this week on the issue too, noting that, no matter what Israel does to bring the perpetrators to justice, the world won't care, and will continue to view Israel and the so-called palestinians using moral equivalence.

Rabbi Elyakim Levanon said that the culprits should receive the death sentence. I have to admit he's got a point - if that's what it takes to send a message that, if you tarnish Israel's image that badly, you'll pay a heavy price.

However this turns out, there may be a lesson here, that we can't underestimate the potential that Jews could commit violent crimes like this one, and that proper education is badly needed to prevent such acts in the future.

From his criticism of the Federal Reserve to his mean libertarian streak, Sen. Rand Paul is certainly his father's son.

But on the issue of Israel, the Kentucky Republican falls far from the tree. Or at least, he'd like voters to think so.

The first-term senator -- whose father Ron Paul was a staunch critic of America's Israel policy and seen in some circles as outright hostile to the Jewish state -- has in recent months taken a distinctly different attitude toward the U.S.-Israel relationship.

He visited Israel in January 2013. He calls himself an Israel supporter.

And after the tragic abduction and killing of three Israeli teens in the West Bank, Paul has ratcheted up those statements of support even more.

"Let's stand with Israel," Paul told Fox News this week.

In response to the deaths of the Israeli teens, the senator who often rails against military intervention showed a hawkish side, in a blistering column that would have been unimaginable coming from his father.

In the column, published in the National Review, he criticized the Obama administration for issuing -- alongside offering its condolences -- a call for restraint.

"How many times must Israel hear this call?" Paul wrote. "Children are murdered -- please show restraint. Cafés and buses are bombed -- please show restraint. Towns are victimized by hundreds of rockets -- please show restraint while you bury your dead once again.

"I think it is clear by now: Israel has shown remarkable restraint. It possesses a military with clear superiority over that of its Palestinian neighbors, yet it does not respond to threat after threat, provocation after provocation, with the type of force that would decisively end their conflict. But sometimes restraint can work against you. Sometimes you just have to say, enough is enough."

In Washington, Paul, a potential 2016 presidential candidate, is now renewing the push for a bill that would effectively cut off aid to the Palestinian government.

While Paul should be viewed with caution on this issue, much like Marine Le Pen would inevitably have to be as well, his message here and quest with the bill are admirable, and that itself is something to be proud of. If he pushes the bill through, that will certainly be something we'll have to give him credit for.

In a dramatic development Sunday, police have announced that the murder of 20-year-old Afula resident Shelly Dadon has been solved.

Police and the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) arrested a taxi driver from the Arab village of Iblin in the Galilee, on suspicion that he carried out the murder for "nationalistic" reasons.

The suspect, named as 38-year-old Hassin Yousef Hassin Khalifah, subsequently confessed under police interrogation to committing the murder, and even reconstructed the crime for police.

Shelly Danon left her home to Migdal Ha'emek on May 1 for a job interview. A few hours later, her body was found in a parking lot in Migdal Ha'emek.

According to the Shin Bet, Khalifah picked his victim up when she hailed his taxi to take her to a job interview in the industrial zone of Migdal Ha'emek. He then stabbed Dadon to death, and fled in his taxi to dispose of the body.

So now it turns out this specific horror was indeed an act of jihadism. The man must be given a smashing punishment for his vile crime. It should be noted that the police have been accused by the Dadon family of hushing up the exact motives of the Islamofascist, and if they did, that was wrong and shameful.